Andrew Moravcsik is a professor of politics at Princeton University, an expert on EU history, and a regular contributor to Prospect magazine, which I read. In a recent issue of Prospect, he reviews a new book by Telegraph journalist Christopher Booker and blogger Richard North, entitled 'The Great Deception'.

In his detailed review (available online at cost), Professor Moravcsik points out that Booker and North are wrong about the foundations of their anti-EU argument.

"To Booker and North's credit, and in contrast to the ravings of many eurosceptics, they do seek to prove their case. … Yet one is immediately sceptical of books peddling a 'secret history' historians have missed, and sure enough, Booker and North advance their case only on the basis of severe historical and statistical distortion."

He then goes on to address Booker and North's ideas in detail, demolishing each of them in turn. What is interesting, though, is not just his authoritative rebuttal but the fact that Booker and North actually based large chunks of their conspiracy theory on their interpretation of the professor's own research! Moravcsik is therefore in an excellent position to point out their errors:

"On this point [De Gaulle's original vetoing of the UK's EU membership], Booker and North rely almost entirely on my own scholarly work, which they prominently portray as the 'real story'…. Very flattering, except that Booker and North misconstrue what I wrote, which accords fully with the new EU historiography."

Another interesting point is that Moravcsik quite clearly does not simply regard his differences with Booker and North as simply a scholarly disagreement on academic details. He observes that the two sceptics repeatedly "obfuscate", "obscure facts" and "fail to mention" key conclusions of the studies they cite. He adds that their understanding of economics "is even dodgier than their history", and discussing a central plank of their argument for intergovernmentalism over international democracy, he remarks, "No serious historian would contend that".

Professor Moravcsik's conclusion:

"Booker and North never demonstrate that British 'intergovernmentalism' - 1950s-style international co-operation without majority voting and legal supremacy - ever constituted a viable alternative [to international democracy]. Even Nafta and the WTO no longer really function in this way.… In the end, then, Booker and North are thrust back on the classic eurosceptic dogma - not xenophobic nationalism, but the complaint that the EU is an 'undemocratic' scheme of centralised regulation. Yet their own story undermines this loose libertarianism. In nearly all their regulatory horror stories the villains are not Brussels bureaucrats - too few in number to exercise much direct control over national policies anyway - but well-meaning British officials exercising their own discretion. And why not? A democracy in which governments placate angry fishermen and abandon regulation designed to prevent the collapse of fish stocks, as recently occurred in the US and Canada, is no democracy at all."

Back to the drawing board for Booker and North?